Doctors are baffled when an expectant mother wakes to find her nearly-to-term pregnancy apparently disappear overnight. Police investigate the situation as a missing child, and only her husband and brother trust her version of events.The movie starts out with some of the most wild shaky cam ever put on film, and then turns into an amateur documentary complete with the wonderful "found footage" style of camera-work. Each time this technique is used it gets more and more irritating, and by 2013 the creators of these films should know better than to use it unless they have a darn good reason.Perhaps this film is called "Absence" because it has an almost complete absence of horror elements. Most of the movie is just footage of flirting, drinking, hanging out. Maybe ten minutes really involves anything scary or supernatural. One could argue this effectively builds the characters, but it does this at the expense of any narrative a viewer would give a hoot about.

First of all, I'm a huge fan of the genre and I have to say that this movie is without a doubt one of my favorites. I really don't get why it has such a low rating here or why people are so disappointed with it. In my humble opinion, all the people who were so disappointed, simply did not get the idea of the movie. The tension in the movie is building up slowly and that's what I love about it. I hate it when they show you the monster in the first 10 minutes of the movie,then I lose interest. I envy all the people out there who still haven't seen it. The actors are doing a great job. I just love everything about this movie, I recommend it to all of you, alien nerds.

**Contains Spoilers**It's a well known adage that the scariest part of a movie is what you DON'T show. While this can be true, a lot of filmmakers lately (particularly ones with low budgets) take this to mean that fuzzy footage and static is just as scary as an actual scary image. If you're the type who gets chills when TV snow appears on your home movies, you'll love this movie. Everyone else: give it a miss. I'll agree that the scariest part of the story is what you don't know, but for there to be a scariest PART of a story, there must first BE a story. What we have here is lazy storytelling. It starts good, with the missing baby. Then there's 45 minutes of completely band vacation footage that doesn't progress the storyline at all. Then there's about 10 minutes of interesting events which, following a good plot construct, should lead to a climax. But there is no climax. Or conflict for that matter. There's just leading up, followed by an end. And when I say end, I don't mean a story ending or a resolution. The credits just start rolling. If you absolutely NEED to know what happens, here's a rundown of events: "Doctors are baffled when a young expectant mother wakes to find her nearly to term pregnancy has disappeared overnight." First of all, know that her pregnancy has absolutely zilch to do with the movie. The movie opens in the hospital, showing the young mother crying and a nurse speaking angrily to some cops. The grief from this event is what prompts the young couple (and the woman's brother) to take a nice relaxing trip to a summer cabin. I say relaxing almost sarcastically here, because from the absolute start, the brother is making stupid comments, mostly directed at the husband. I guess he thinks that the way to make his sister feel better is to constantly nag her husband about everything from his car to his shoes. The nagging is constant, it's not clever or witty, and at one point he even goes so far to tell her that her husband will leave her to become an alcoholic. All of this "jokingly." Over the course of the next hour, the three meet a local girl, and there is a montage of vacation scenes. They play scrabble, go swimming, drive through town, and have a cookout. This occurs on different days. The only creepiness is shown at night when:The camera turns itself on at night revealing lights/screaming that no one seems to remember in the morning. The vacationers notice a bright light off in the woods that they idly remark on before completely disregarding. The wife gets nosebleeds. Two of them. One's pretty bad. That's it. In the last 10 minutes, you get all the action. Once again, the brother awakens at night to hear screaming and lights from his sister's room. He runs into the hallway and bangs on their door before falling unconscious (somehow turning the camera off.) The next day, no one remembers anything and they have a cookout. The wife falls lethargic and when her husband goes to comfort her, he notices a lump the size of a thumb running up and down her arm, under the skin. The local girl becomes terrified and runs away. The husband insists that they visit a hospital, but the wife says she is tired, so they all just go to sleep. (?????) That night, the lights and screaming come again, but this time the brother manages to knock down the door. He sees the husband hanging suspended in the air above the bed. As soon as the door comes down, the husband drops, hitting the bed frame. At this point, everyone falls unconscious again and there are no focused shots for the rest of the movie. They wake up in the morning to discover the wife is missing. They drive all over town to look for her. They don't find her, but they do find their local friend. For some reason the camera focuses on her feet as she insists that she hasn't seen the wife and that she's sorry. It is clear she knows something terrifying, but she says nothing. The brother angrily gets back into the car and they drive off into the wilderness, eventually finding the wife in a pine barren. She appears catatonic. They decide to drive home, for some reason still not seeing the need to visit a hospital. As they drive home, night falls. A light suddenly appears in front of the car. The husband gets out and fires some shots into the darkness. A few seconds later, he is thrown into the windshield which shatters, destroying all visibility. The camera is now filming in total darkness. You can see vague shapes in between bouts of static. For a second, you can see the sister being apparently pulled from the car. Then there is a shot of the car from above. The camera then falls to the ground, and a couple seconds later, the brother lands beside it, dead. That's the end of the movie. So, what happened to the baby? Or the mother? Why take a 7 month old fetus? Why not wait 2 more months? Are the aliens following them? If so, why does the local girl seem to know something? The baby was taken from a family in a town hours away from where she lives. Why can the aliens erase memory, but haven't figured out how to erase a video camera? Why start the film with a missing baby if the baby has nothing to do with the plot and never re-appears? These are the parts of the non-story that you don't know.

First of all before I begin this review, I would like to say I watched this movie expecting an average found footage movie and weren't expecting an amazing blockbuster movie so if you're a fan of the found footage sub genre then check it out, if not then stay far away.With the recent wave of alien movies hitting our shelves/big screens (such as Unaware, Dark Skies, Tape #4 in V/H/S/2, etc.) I was excited to see what directors could offer us next. Here we have Absence, a brand new immediately underrated creepy and suspenseful found footage sci-fi horror movie, before I say anymore, here's a quick rundown on the movie's plot:The movie begins with Evan, a camera obsessed student filming his sister, Liz and her husband, Rick in hospital where they have just been told that the previously pregnant Liz is no longer pregnant which soon becomes a missing child case which leads to Liz and Rick being the talk of the town and being hassled by the media, etc. so to get a break from it all they decide to go to Rick's family cabin in the woods for a while and it's from this point on where things start to get really weird...After the hospital scene at the start of the film it does become very slow moving which in my opinion is a good thing because whilst the film is at a slow pace it gives you time to get to know the characters better so when the bad stuff does happen to them you'll care more about whether they live/die. It also adds a great sense of realism to the film when you see them cooking, playing pranks on each other, etc.When the scares do eventually show up it's worth the wait as this film has some very creepy moments, one in particular with a visitor at the back door at night time, which is a very quick but effective scare. I don't want to spoil anything but as with most found footage endings the ending is also very effective and the least I say about it the better.Overall I've gave this movie a solid 9 out of 10 because I thought it was a great found footage scare-fest that fans of movies such as Paranormal Activity, Unaware, The Fourth Kind and Dark Skies will enjoy, however, as I mentioned at the start of the review, if you hate found footage films and are expecting a blockbuster movie with amazing special effects and amazing actors then stay clear, this isn't for you.